Has John Boehner and the House GOP misstepped with their opposition to the two-moth payroll tax cut extension?... fb.me/1m2gtqV4K6 years ago

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WELCOME

Welcome to The Politicizer and with it, welcome to a new perspective on politics. The Politicizer is a new kind of political blog – It is neither right wing, nor left wing, nor is it moderate. The Politicizer is not a news feed, a report, or even a journal – rather it is the voice of the generation that was the focus of the 2008 election – young people, the ‘Internet Generation’.

Think of the most recent party you were at, recall how many people you told that it was ‘nice to meet them’ now, how many of these people did you actually find it nice to meet?

This unofficial ratio is roughly the same for our generation, as it applies to media outlets and personalities that “add us on facebook” and “follow us on twitter.” Nice to tweet you, but often times we don’t really want to talk to you. Recall from my original post titled ‘Meet our Generation” that the internet is an integral part of our social lives, not an addition to it. Now, just like a normal social situation, it’s nice to meet someone, but if they aren’t talking about something interesting – it’s really not. In the same way, it’s nice you have a twitter and are tweeting your thoughts in an effort to reach out to our generation, but if it’s not interesting or relevant – it’s really not ‘nice to tweet you’. Read the rest of this entry »

Within the past 24 hours, a man walked into the Holocaust Museum and used it as a shooting gallery. This white-supremacist held a perverted motivation to prey upon this particular site, blaming the Jewish people for destroying Western Civilization – or something along those lines. I, as a libertarian, believe that everyone is entitled to their batshit-crazy opinions and interpretations of history with the faith that most average Americans wont fall into any patterns of insipid lunacy. However, I am fiercely opposed to violence and the violation of personal property in our Republic. With that being said, a paragraph in the Associated Press report caught my eye as a reminder of why I am pro-Second Amendment despite my peaceful demeanor:

“Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said investigators are trying to better understand time he spent in Idaho, and how he acquired the .22-caliber rifle used in Wednesday’s attack. At the request of the U.S. Park Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is tracing the weapon. Under federal law, convicted felons cannot purchase firearms.”

Gun laws only restrict the law-abiding citizens of this nation. The culprit, James Von Brunn, most certainly acquired his arms in an illegal manner. Read the rest of this entry »

According to recent news reports, the Supreme Court decided to refuse to grant cert to a case coming from the First Circuit in which the court upheld the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy as Constitutional.

Those who I’ve met who support the measure like to say that they “don’t want anyone talking about their private life at work” and that “private and work life should be separate”. Unfortunately, these people are operating under a flawed understand of both reality and the policy — and any accurate understanding of reality, combined with an accurate understanding of the policy and the Constitution, unperverted by ideological bias, should lead to the conclusion that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is unquestionably unconstitutional, for a variety of reasons.

First, allow me to debunk the notion that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is just about people keeping their private lives private. This is, of course, a ridiculous notion. Besides the fact that pretty much in any work situation, people are going to talk about and be asked about their personal lives (as someone who has held both full-time and part-time jobs, I can attest to this fact personally) — sometimes by their superiors. But this isn’t the extent of it. While many Americans might prefer for their co-workers to keep their private and public lives in totally different spheres, this becomes substantially harder when one lives at work; and this is exactly what American soldiers must do. Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as Lyndon Johnson put down his pen after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he turned to an aide and said “We have lost the South for a generation.” Despite President Johnson’s accurate forecast, remnants of the Democratic Party’s longtime marriage to the South remain. Just last week, a Democrat won a low turnout special election to fill an Alabama state senate seat in a district that overwhelmingly voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin. The difference between Democratic performance at the national and state level is nothing new in the South. This discrepancy, however, is larger than it has ever been and is even beginning to effect down-ballot Democrats in predominantly White districts.

Before Obama’s historic election in November, only two Democrats have occupied the White House since Lyndon Johnson ceded the “Solid South” to the Republicans. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, however, won with the support of culturally conservative white voters in states like Tennessee and Louisiana. While Clinton won 46 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes in 1992, Obama only carried 10.

Located deep in the heart of Bayou country, Lafourche Parish is a microcosm of the South’s latest chapter in its divorce from the Democratic Party. With a White population of over 80%, Lafourche Parish abounds with the type of culturally conservative Democrat that swept Bill Clinton into office. While Bill Clinton won the Parish, Barack Obama registered a dismal 26% of the vote. Read the rest of this entry »

Friedrich August von Hayek accused the liberal mindset of being “all about control.” I cannot synthesize the recent policies of the Democratic Party and boil it down to a more simple fact than that. (Conservatives are rarely better, but their focus is not about shrinking the gap between the wealthy and poor and neutralizing competition. They adhere first towards issues of security and pseudo-imperialism in the interests of business.) As I tread further into the waters of my collegiate career, I often find an ironic hypocrisy that characterizes improperly-titled “liberals.”

My classmates have blogs that smear the frivolous opinions of Miss California as being evil and warranting hatred. Personally, I do not agree that Gay Marriage should be banned, but I welcome dissent in the constant dialogue that democracy requires to be a dynamic force. I also acknowledge the validity of Miss California’s opinion as being of equal value as mine, perhaps even more as the State of New Jersey does not vote on propositions and merely lets things slide through our inept state legislature. Debate and lobbying will propel Gay Marriage to the status of a federal or judicial, not state, issue, much like Alice Paul was able to do with Women’s Suffrage in 1919. Proponents of this issue appealed to the minds of skeptics by making a cohesive argument, not by being dismissive and mean.

This hunger for control manifests itself in a diminutive attitude towards the minds of the American people. This is perhaps what disgusts me about liberal lawmakers most. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, gay marriage became legal in New Hampshire, the sixth state to do so. According to the Boston Globe, proponents of the new law, including its perhaps most important supporter, Governor John Lynch, cited “individual liberties and protections” as to why they supported the measure. As with many such events, supporters of traditional marriage stood outside the New Hampshire State House, evoking God and the fact that “God meant marriage to be between a man and a woman” (again from the Globe). Looks like a typical gay marriage legislation signing, no? There were people supporting the righteous quest of equal rights on the inside, and God’s army on the outside. Not only is it a topical issue, but it reinforces our political stereotypes; it’s the perfect news item.

Or maybe not. Anyone who has ever been exposed to political journalism (whether it’s Fox News or CNN, newspapers, etc) have all had it ingrained in them specific stereotypes about each party, such as how Democrats tend to favor increased government involvement in society. The issue of gay marriage, however, stands as a direct contradiction of that, as it decreases government say on who should have marriage rights. This is just one more example of why attempting to throw people, and their parties, in pretty little ideological boxes because of who they vote for, just doesn’t work. We – conservatives and liberals alike – are being strangled by ideological stereotypes, and it really needs to end. Read the rest of this entry »

During his highly publicized commencement speech to Notre Dame, Obama pleaded that we must find common ground on abortion, and pointed out that both the pro-life movement and the pro-choice movement care equally about women.

Mr. President, it isn’t about the woman, it’s about the child.

This is not even to point out that it’s impossible to find common ground between a group that wants a child to be born, and a group that wants to stop that from happening. But, as pro-lifers growing up in the first generation to be able to see our brothers and sisters on ultrasound before they were even born, our fellow ‘millennials’ are more pro-life than any group of young people since Roe v Wade – and for us pro-lifers, it’s not that we both care equally about women – we do, it’s that we see the right to be born as tantamount, and indeed the gateway to all other rights. We care for that mother just as much as the pro-choice advocates do, but unlike those pro-choice advocates, we see the depression, anxiety and health risks she will face from an abortion. We care for that woman and we insist that she bring the blessing to the world that is her child, into life. We do not seek to control women’s lives as Obama and pro-choice advocates might accuse.

Rather, we seek something fundamentally opposite; we wish to unleash the potential of each and every human life upon our world. Read the rest of this entry »

WELCOME to The Politicizer and with it, welcome to a new perspective on politics. The Politicizer is a new kind of political blog – It is neither right wing, nor left wing, nor is it moderate. The Politicizer is not a news feed, a report, or even a journal – rather it is the voice of the generation that was the focus of the 2008 election – young people, the ‘Internet Generation’.

Comprised of eight bloggers, from states and universities across the nation, we have an array of political persuasions and personal opinions. We are conservative, liberal, moderate, libertarian, capitalist, democrat, republican, socialist and independent and we are quite literally all on the same page. The Politicizer seeks first to express all opinions, and second to express our generation, where we have come from, where we are, and most importantly, where we are headed.

Many pundits and commentators assume that they live in the same world as the current group of 16-20 somethings currently gathering all the media and political attention. Yet even if they have barely crossed the ’30 mark’ their world is still vastly different from ours. To point out a few differences, most of us learned to drive on two to three dollar a gallon gasoline and don’t consider it too bad, we’ve never really looked anything up in an encyclopedia except for an assignment, the internet is a part of our daily social lives rather than an addition to it, and for the most part the only thing most people our age remember about Bill Clinton is that he had an affair and his wife ran for President.

So really then, where are we coming from? If our world is so different from those who have come before us, what shaped it? To start out, as young people, we are understandably frustrated – either with the new President, the past President, or both of them. As students, we are facing the prospects of high unemployment and a weakened United States to greet us upon our graduation. We have navigated politics during a bitterly partisan era.These surely are among our top concerns yet this blog was born of another frustration – the frustration we feel when ‘young people’ are grouped into a single political category, ideology or group. We did not all vote for Obama, we are not all consumerist, we are not all selfish, we do not define ourselves by the clothes we buy, we did not all grow up playing video games, we are all not in favor of gay marriage, and we aren’t wholly conservative or liberal, and unlike generations before us, we have not found a great social movement to which to join up with, nor did we band together in protest of a war as generations before us did. We witnessed America rally together in the wake of a vicious attack that ruptured our collective childhood, an attack that once and for all silenced what we had been told growing up in a post-cold war world…mainly that “Wars don’t happen here” and “America is the safest country on earth.” In the wake of this unified America, we watched our nation get suddenly torn apart by partisan quarrels and election cycles. We are young Americans who grew up during the most prosperous time in recent history, witnessed our way of life brutally attacked, yet stood resilient with our nation and watched it recover only to see it stumble once again in the wake of our most recent economic problems.

Unfortunately, this is where we are now. We are the first age group in decades to worry that our college educations may not be enough to attain the American Dream, and we have watched three bitterly contested elections and a government that has swung like a pendulum, with no substantial results no matter who is in control. We stand poised to take over a world with a wounded economy, and a changing global paradigm. Our old alliances are being both challenged and strengthened, and new ones are being cultivated by an equally new President. We are taught in our college lecture halls that China is creeping up on the United States and that we are being released into a job market that includes competition from Mumbai and Shanghai not just Los Angeles and New York.

So now, where are we headed? I hope that readers will find, from this blog’s own writers, that our generation, this ‘internet generation’ like every American generation before us is not satisfied with this reality and will fight for a leg up, wants to see a unified America and is determined to make this world better than we found it – and again, like every American generation before us, we could not disagree more on how to get there.

Conor J Rogers is currently a student at the George Washington University, former Chairman of the New Jersey Teenage Republican Organization, The Tri-State Republican Volunteer Team, and has served as a campaign staffer and volunteer for the Rudy Giuliani and John McCain Presidential Campaigns and Tom Kean for Senate Campaign. A fiscal conservative and social moderate, he is the Political Editor for The Politicizer.